That there are around 10⁸² atoms in the universe is a great example of how we can’t think well about large numbers. That looks wrong to me at first glance.
6 months ago · 👍 jsreed5
Hmmm a billion cubic feet is kinda a nice unit because the cube root of a billion is one thousand. So it's a cube 1000 feet on a side :) which is maybe one zeppelin? · 6 months ago
@jsreed5 Great example. If that was posed to me as a question, I'd be guessing a lot more than "15 digits". · 6 months ago
Scale is a very difficult thing to understand. One of my favorites: for its highest-precision calculations, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses only 15 digits of pi, but that's enough precision to calculate the circumference of a circle the diameter of the Solar System to millimeter accuracy. · 6 months ago
I deal with scale all the time working in Survey and CAD drafting and I think there's just a point where it's too much. When I worked in energy they used to give us awards for BCF of Methane we thruput . That's a Billion Cubic Feet and they'd be in little acrylic numbers. So I'd be like yeah that's great and all but what is 6BCF like can I get that in zepplins or something I could grasp... The marketing department just wanted us to be excited for new number and not ask questions.. · 6 months ago
Think this might be more of a thing about /representations/ of numbers than their magnitude. 10^82 is just "ten and eighty-two", but rephrase it as "ten billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion" and I'm sure the scale starts to become clearer. · 6 months ago
oh, here’s a good one a drunk friend once blew my (also drunk) mind with in a bar: if time is infinite, wouldn’t there be, in the long run, a point in time where all these atoms randomly rearrange again in this exact configuration and we are here again getting wasted in this bar?
i was young (yet drinking, oops) and it took me forever to figure out that this is not how it works. that was at a time where you couldn’t just look this stuff up on the internet but had to go talk to people and read books in a library. · 6 months ago
and yet here i am wondering what kind of unicode abuse you had to do to get 82 appear as superscript typesetting. the 8 renders more like a 90 degree rotated infinity ♾️ symbol on my screen. · 6 months ago